It wasn’t too many years ago that I found myself on the slopes of a beautiful mountain ski resort, zooming down the run on skis that had no decals on them, using poles with no sign of their maker, wearing clothes with no visible logos sewn onto them, protecting my eyes with goggles that had no branding artfully worked into the fabric of the headstrap.

When I finished my run, I entered the lodge where several, indeed a clear majority of people, were also wearing clothes with little or no corporate labels. There were no vid screens blaring out advertisements for lift tickets, local restaurants, or vacation packages. No ads promoting snow-conquering cars or winter tires.

It was a world where advertising, corporate-style mass marketing, and technology had not yet begun to dominate everyone’s visual and auditory fields. It was a world that was white, pristine, silent, thrilling, and natural all on its own and no one seemed to need to be reminded of how glorious it all was. A sales pitch wasn’t required or expected; we got the message about all that winter coolness all on our own. My attention was unfixed and free to enjoy the winter playground and the people around me without constraint.

The world is different today. Today, people are mobile billboards for their shoes, jeans, caps, gloves, eyewear, sports equipment, cellphones, cars, satchels, luggage, laptops, purses, and jewelry. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past several years, you have been conditioned by thousands of hours of television, miles of billboards, and endless gigabytes of the Web.

Even the Internet, once proudly non-commercial, has been taken over by mass marketers who’ve refined their black arts for the digital age. Who is swayed by 2D line drawings in newsprint ads, when rich media has given us interactive, emotionally engaging ads designed to engage and entertain? Most of the information overload we complain about comes not from anything important, it comes from trivializing our connection to the world through overt consumerism and mass marketing.

Human beings have a seemingly infinite hunger for and capacity to be sponges of information. We revel in it like hogs in a wallow. We can’t get enough of it. If we should experience a momentary lull in the background marketing chitchat that’s always present in our lives, we become oddly disturbed. Rampant commercialism and propagandistic merchandising is so ubiquitous in modern culture that we must be constantly bombarded with some kind of sales pitch to feel all’s right with the world.

We pay little attention to its spread to our children, who now demand expensive designer shoes and tiny little labels on their own clothing. We do not notice how popular movies have become hyper-merchandised into toys, cereal boxes, books, DVDs, music, and vacation packages. We click our tongues at our sports heroes caught in marital indiscretions, but seem to be more interested in the millions of lost revenues from endorsing sponsors. Our attention is increasingly fixed on the trivial.

Pharmaceutical companies, once banished to doctors’ offices and hospital procurement programs, now use television to make their pitches to minute niches with a few thousand sufferers of this condition or that. Find enough of those sufferers willing to plunk down their insurance cards or their cash and you’re talking serious profits. It doesn’t take a math genius to estimate those profits for pills that cost pennies to manufacture and sell for $300 a bottle. Multiply that by say, 50,000 patients (out of a total population of several hundred million) and you’re in niche nirvana.

Amplify that by the power of television to persuade and you can further sell to those who probably don’t have that condition in reality or don’t really have to medicate for it if they do, but are convinced that they should. All that remains is to cheerfully cover the possible adverse side effects — dizziness, constipation, heart failure, nerve damage, convulsions, whatever — with a smile and a song and you’re all set.

Wall Street and Madison Avenue have partnered up with blessings from Big Insurance and the AMA. The American people are now a little further down the road toward believing in their own utter lack or health. All of which has been made possible only within the last decade by a recent president’s push to “liberalize” the regulations concerning advertising for the pharmaceutical industry — after millions of political contributions by said industry to convince the lawmakers of its righteous claim to mass market its products on the airwaves.

Are you truly feeling healthier now that you know that your “restless leg” syndrome can be easily, if a bit expensively, treated with a prescription? Are you happy knowing that Grandad can now conveniently perform like a stud in the bedroom with Grandma? Twitching limbs or other body parts not your concern? Nevermind . . . the marketers will find another drug to bring relief or delight, even if you don’t yet realize you need it.

We are living in a virtual chaos of information, and most of it utter drivel. Our culture has been commandeered by corporate interests pushing information to millions of info-junkies who are not even aware of the war being waged for their hearts and minds, not to mention their bodies — via their pocketbooks.

While there is nothing wrong per se with information itself, there is something seriously out of sorts with our individual lives, our society, and our collective future when we begin to OD on the junk info that masquerades as the real deal. Junk info, like junk food, does nothing to support our overall health and well being. Eat too much junk food and you can actually become ill and die of malnutrition. Consume too much junk info and your attention fixes on irrelevant and meaningless data that has no place in a healthy, fully functioning, multidimensional living system.

The point is that all this marketing is polluting our environment with an unnecessary and ultimately meaningless form of energy that has only a few real effects: it takes away our awareness of who we are and what we can become, it saps our ability to function efficiently without distraction, and it fixes our attention on the trivial rather than on what’s important for our personal well being and our collective potential as a species.

Can we not make some decisions right now before it’s too late? Can we not focus on our real needs rather than on this freak show of consumerism? Can we not choose to do something different?

About the Author
Timothy Thompson is a professional freelance writer/editor whose work with Dream Manifesto helps illuminate life for online and offline audiences around the world. He currently makes his home in southern California and is working on several content writing and editing projects. Visit Thompson Inkworks for information.